1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to computer logic. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to calculating cryptographic sum of one or more records of a relational database and comparing the cryptographic sum against an incoming cryptographic sum of one or more rows of an incoming record to determine if rows of the incoming record are unique.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are times when it is necessary to identify the uniqueness of a composite of all values of an entire row in a relational database. Existing approaches of defining a primary or unique index key in a row of values simply describes the uniqueness of the columns in those index keys and does not tell anything about the other columns in that row. Creating a primary or unique key for the entire row may not be practical in many cases because the row may contain a substantial number of columns, or have varying data types. Currently there is no efficient manner to update only columns of an existing relational database that have changed when receiving a large source file with many rows that have not changed from the data in the relational database.